18:00

28 : Play It Safe

One week.

It had been one week since Pepper had watched everything fall apart.

Everything had been fine just a few days ago. Just the other day, OJ had told her that Lightbulb was just making sure Mephone4 showed up. Just the other day, Pepper had spent almost an hour standing near the snacks table waiting for her friend to come back. And it was just the other day that a corpse mangled beyond recognition was found, but Mephone4 and Lightbulb weren't.

It was a wednesday today, 1 in the evening. On any normal day, those affected in the lab incident would have their little meeting in the library. Although Pepper had still come by to the library today, nobody else was there, leaving her alone in her silence with just a notebook and pen to keep her company.

One week. That was all it had taken for a number of objects to lock themselves in their rooms, leaving the rest of the hotel residents to worry about them without a response. Pepper might've not been one of those objects, but she certainly knew people who had hidden themselves away with the new disappearances.

OJ still came down for meals, but apart from that, he stayed in his office or room. He'd insist he was working, though he had never had this much work before, so everybody knew. Tissues insisted his sudden lack of appearance was exhaustion, which it easily could be, but something about the timing made Pepper doubt that. Apple and Marshmallow didn't go downstairs much anymore out of shame, and Paintbrush no longer had anybody to talk to with their entire friend group either being dead, despised by the hotel, or missing. And all Pepper could do was watch as those object's appearing became about as common as seeing Lightbulb.

There were only four objects who had seen what really turned the situation around. Knife, OJ, and Paper had all actively searched for it, though that didn't mean they had been prepared for what they would read. Paintbrush just happened to walk in on them since they were in the painting utensil's room. Pepper couldn't imagine how horrid it must've been for those four objects if just hearing a summary of what they read sent shivers down her spine.

Just one week, and Pepper wasn't the only one feeling alone now.

She looked around the empty library, her eyes browsing the shelves. She was never much of a reader, but she had probably read a couple of the titles on the shelf in her spare time at this point. She didn't feel like ending her streak of not reading right now though.

Out of all of the things she could want to do right now, the thing she wanted to do the most was talk to Lightbulb. As she had been waiting to do at the party, as she would do on any other day if Lightbulb wasn't gone.

If you told Pepper back on the show that her best friend now was Lightbulb, she would think you're joking. But here she was, silently terrified of what might happen to the optimistic bulb in her new surroundings.

The only reason they got along so well would be the fact Pepper needed somebody who actually understood her, in a literal sense. Not many of the hotel residents bothered to learn sign language after Pepper lost her ability to speak. Meanwhile, Lightbulb had been the one who helped Pepper learn ASL in the first place. It wasn't a question as to why they started getting along after the lab.

And now, for all Pepper knew, they may never have another one of their silent yet ever so loud conversations again.

Suddenly, the lack of noise in the library felt all too understimulating for Pepper to handle. With a disfigured grunt, courtesy of her tarnished vocal cords, she walked back out of the library. Exactly where else she planned on going, only her legs knew.

Her body guided her up the stairs, her mind with no real idea on where she was going. Just somewhere to kill the thoughts that piled up in her mind, she guessed. Or maybe just to kill boredom. It was anybody's guess.